Aficionados of the Ministry of Justice website will have noticed that it spent much of December issuing stern guidance on how to address correctly all the country's big cheeses, to save the rest of us from making monumental faux pas, like addressing the second daughter of the illegitimate archbishop son of a marquess-in-waiting as "Hi babe".

Included in the hefty and tedious list is the judiciary: how to describe judges, how to write to them, what to call them in court. There is, alas, only one change from the last time the guidance was issued. The surname of the examples of various kinds of judges has been updated from Smith to Doe.

Male high court judges will continue to be officially referred to as Mr Justice Doe. Women are Mrs Justice, even if unmarried, a decision taken because the term Miss Justice could too easily be associated with miscarriage of justice, or missed justice. More absurdly, judges of the court of appeal are cited as Lord Justice or Lady Justice Doe, even though they are in no way peers of the realm. Like high court judges, they are merely Sir Jack and Dame Jill. But appeal judges have to be addressed in court as My Lord and My Lady as do, even more illogically, high court judges. When the first woman appeal court judge was appointed in 1988 she, at first, had to be referred to as Lord Justice Butler-Sloss because an act of parliament said so - when the law was passed, it was assumed that the holder of such a senior judicial post would always be a man.

What is the point of the Mr, Mrs, Lord and Lady? Very few people other than lawyers appreciate these niceties. Nor is there any reason why they should. They are neither logical nor necessary.

If, centuries ago, there was a valid reason for adding these appendages, it has long disappeared. Today, it serves only to confuse. (I should add that Scotland has its own, separate complexities such as their high court judges being called Lord McDoe, though they have no link with the House of Lords.)

Why should the public be asked to or be expected to find their way through the labyrinthine rules that govern judicial nomenclature? Why should they be obliged to work out whether to call the judge in their case My Lord, Your Honour or Your Worship?

No other country in the English-speaking legal world seems to need such convoluted forms of address. In most countries judges are referred to as Justice, which is only one word and has the advantage of being sex-neutral. The United States supreme court has no problem with that appellation, with its head being Chief Justice. Is it suggested that this somehow diminishes the respect in which the judges, or the court, are supposed to be held? I have noticed that some respectable publications, even those concerned with legal affairs, have begun to drop the Mr and Mrs that the Ministry of Justice website urges us to use.

I hope the trend continues apace, until Lord Chancellor Straw takes the hint and abolishes these unnecessary accoutrements, whose only function is to preserve the general populace's lack of understanding of the judiciary.